The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  “What happens to spies when they are caught?” she asks Son. She wants him to know that she knows. Or thinks she knows. She sees no other reason why the soldiers have not already shot him. After all, he is Vietnamese; he is of military age; he is traveling with a woman who was almost certainly aligned in some way with enemy forces. Under most circumstances they’d have shot him outright—there would be no question. There was no reason not to shoot him, no weight in the decision. Old men, women, pregnant young wives, sometimes even children, the everyday kill of such soldiers. And here they are, drinking with a man who by all rights ought to be considered their enemy, playing cards with him.

  She says, “You must know something they want to find out. Or maybe you have a high rank and they don’t dare kill you.”

  He says nothing. The soldiers are making some kind of tea from curled leaves that give off a smell like freshly mown grass. She tries again. She says, “What will they do to you when they find out you spy for the Americans?”

  There is a long silence, then, “I don’t spy for the Americans.”

  Her stomach lurches and it feels for all the world as though the earth has suddenly swayed. A lever in her mind, and now she understands and wishes she did not. He’s a spy, all right, but she hadn’t understood correctly. Now she does. “You don’t spy for the Americans,” she says.

  He shakes his head slowly.

  “Not for the Americans,” she says again. She hates what she is learning. It enters her painfully, this information.

  “You do a good imitation of a photographer,” she sighs. “Though I guess a spy has to have a convincing counterfeit profession to hide behind.”

  “I am a photographer. You know that.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she says, “except you hold powerful sway with these soldiers.”

  There is a pause. It would seem that Son is quite willing to forfeit the conversation entirely, to let it stop right here.

  “So explain this: why me?” says Susan. “Why did you choose me, of all people?”

  He says nothing.

  “I remember how you found me at Pleiku. That look on your face. You pegged me. I know you did.”

  All this she says easily. No emotion to her voice. She does not want the soldiers—if they are listening—to guess at their conversation, or to imagine that they are arguing. She keeps her voice light, her inflections playful. Judging from the tone of the conversation you’d think she was reminiscing about a nice summer’s day.

  She continues, “What will the Americans do to you when they find out? Or are you planning to go underground now? Or join these guys? Or live in Hanoi, if we ever make it that far? And you know we won’t. I won’t.”

  She hears him sigh. Or perhaps it is a yawn. “I’ve told them you are English,” he says, finishing the sentence with her name; not her given name, Susan, but a nickname that she allows only him to use: “Susey” “And that you’ve been a help to me.”

  “Well, that’s certainly the truth,” she says. “Did you mention I had no idea what kind of help I was providing?”

  “I have told them to take me with them and verify my identity and position. If you make yourself into my enemy, you may be in danger. Not from me, you understand.”

  “They have my papers. And those say I am American. From Chicago. It’s all there.”

  “They have no papers.”

  “Of course they do.”

  “No. They do not yet realize, but they do not have them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I ate them. Last night. With the rice. They weren’t paying so much attention.”

  In other circumstances, it might have been funny. “What about my MACV card?” she says. “Did you eat that, too?”

  It was hard plastic-coated card, like a driver’s license, that identified her as press.

  “You have your MACV card,” he says.

  She feels in her pockets and there it is, a rectangle of stern plastic. It is there, like an egg conjured up by a magician, appearing at once from behind her ear. “You stole it back,” she whispers. He says nothing. “What will happen after they figure out who you are?”

  “They may be glad they didn’t kill me.”

  “Will you be released?”

  “I would hope.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “Then? It is up to you what happens.”

  Up to her? “Son, who are you? Who are you exactly?”

  With the new supply of rice the soldiers are more relaxed. The next day they give her back her canteen, which she tops up whenever possible from the small pools that collect in the jungle’s wide, oversized leaves. Gap Tooth shows her how to get clean water from a bank, and even how water comes out of bamboo. She has already learned to tie the thin branches of low trees into a canopy that creates shade, to squat on her heels when eating. Long Hair removes his necklace on which hangs a P-38, a US Army tool that opens combat-ration cans, and shares one of the precious cans of rations with her. It holds peaches, and when she realizes this she feels overwhelmed with gratitude, her dry mouth suddenly moist with the thought of eating them, the juice so good it might be from another world. If this is how she feels about canned peaches, she wonders what her response would be to other foods. She imagines grilled trout, lemons. She imagines black cherries and bacon. She forces herself to stop thinking about food, because it is almost unbearable to do so, but she finds once more her mind drifting: lemonade, a cold sweet orange.

  Her actual diet, apart from rice, is now crickets and other insects, brought to a smoky crisp in a small bowl of charcoal carried on a pole like a kind of mobile barbecue. The bowl is another of the treasures discovered at the hamlet. It serves as a kitchen and a focus for their attention, too, as they collect worms and termites from the jungle floor, charring them in the charcoal one after the other. The rice makes all the difference. It smells a little like mildew (not that she cares), and the peaches are a godsend. Thank you, she says in French, and again in Vietnamese, for it is one of the few phrases she knows. Thank you, thank you.

  There are places so thick with bush that the soldiers could shrug their rifles over their shoulders, give a command, and all disappear into the bush. Other areas are like a dark, dense forest, the sunlight filtering through in small spiky bursts of light, so that it feels like living inside the green glass of a bottle. They march at night, and though it is cooler she is spooked by the phosphorescence of the jungle floor, a ghostly swimming light caused by fungus on the ground.

  She is given a mixture of water and lime juice to pour on her feet. She does this, shuddering with pain. They bring out the iodine next. She looks hard at the medicine, trying to judge how much has evaporated since last time and pressing the cap with her fingers, trying to repair the damaged threading that makes it leak. Lime juice, then iodine. She can almost feel the goodness of this combination in her flesh. Afterwards, Son tears strips of his trousers, tying them just below her knee to keep the leeches from climbing up her legs. As he bends over her, carefully arranging the leech straps, whatever vestiges of anger from the day before vanish. He is a spy but right now it does not matter. He’s negotiated with the soldiers for her food, her medicine. He is helping protect her from the leeches she dreads. This is all that she can consider at the moment, and that she is alive because of him.

  She puts her hand on his cheek.

  “Don’t,” he says, jerking his cheek from her palm. “I don’t deserve it.”

  He is the Son she has always known, the boy who taught her how to play Tien Len, who slept on her floor, who sometimes grabbed her thumb with his hand and lurched along the street like a chimpanzee, who could make a sound like a cricket, who taught her to blow smoke rings, and once showed her the magnificent scar from his burst appendix. She does not want to leave him—whatever he has done or is doing. If they let her go but keep him, she thinks how hard it would be never to see him again. Not to go with him to milk bars in Saigon, watch him working on his photogra
phs in the small hotel room that has become a kind of office and home, not to travel with him beside her, or to see his face which is more familiar to her now than her own. It feels to her the universal theme in this country: departure and loss. Everyone is always in the process of leaving. Everyone is dying or disappearing or going away or being sent home. You never got used to it. Even the soldiers who had served two or three tours, even they didn’t, and certainly not her.

  “Son—” she begins. She thinks the worst thing about his being a spy is that they will have to be separated. Or that one of them will die.

  He does not let her finish. He pats her knee, stands up all at once, and turns his back, walking away. They are now moving again through the brush, making slow headway, the whole process tedious and uncomfortable.

  The next day it is she who holds the smoking charcoal pot and Gap Tooth who goes barefoot. Gap Tooth’s sandals fit her the best, the outline of his feet being covered easily by her own. She is more comfortable now; walking with less trouble than the day before. Even so, it is a wonder to her that these soldiers can march barefoot without pain or injury. At a rest stop Gap Tooth sits beside her and she finds herself staring at his feet, at the tough soles that are caked with calluses. He notices her doing this and takes the opportunity to show off his feet the way he once showed off his sword. He points to the leathery skin, brown and smooth. He explains that the soles of his feet are shoes.

  “Yours, maybe. Mine are casualties,” she says.

  “You need work,” he says. “You need practice.”

  She is supposed to use a long wooden pole with a fan at the end to catch insects for the charcoal pot. The pot smokes and crackles as she moves down the path, giving off a heat that causes her to sweat even more. Try as she might, she cannot target an insect correctly and little makes its way into the pot. Long Hair takes the pole from her and shows her how to sweep the fan. He scoops up several insects and drops them quickly on to the hot charcoal, then pushes one into his mouth as though it were popcorn. She tries again, but she is no good at it. Finally, she is allowed to pass the project on to the Thin One, who stares at her as though she is utterly useless, so that she cringes under his gaze. But at least he takes on the pot and fan.

  She is settling into the walk again when suddenly the soldiers freeze, speaking rapidly to one another. There is the sound of airplanes, like a rumble of thunder that grows louder by the second.

  “Don’t move,” she is told.

  This has happened before, planes going overhead, never spotting them, never even swinging back to take a second look in case what they saw down there was a person. You would think spotter planes would see the five of them walking, but it seems never to be the case. However, this time feels different. She knows it is different even before anything happens, though she cannot say why. The planes are screaming; she can feel the earth vibrate. She yells to Son that it is an air strike and, just as she does so, there is an enormous explosion. The soldiers have their guns out but they do not move an inch. She wants to run. She begins to argue but Long Hair grabs her arm and demands that she not move. “Stay!” he growls, pinching her elbow. But then another explosion; this from napalm, and the soldiers’ reactions change abruptly. Long Hair lets her go, pushing her aside now as they run, crashing through the thick brush.

  She tries to follow. It is the natural thing to do. She is shouting but the noise is so loud around them that she cannot be heard, the jungle exploding, ribbons of fire sailing above them. She can feel the heat from the flames, the air changing around her; she runs as fast as she can but Son and the soldiers have disappeared. She cannot find them and she is racing forward now through brush that scratches her face, tears her clothes. The sandals cannot protect the tops of her feet from thorns and vines. The air seems to hold no weight to it—it is as though she is breathing in a vacuum. Then within minutes, within seconds even, the sound of the planes lifts, leaving in their wake clouds of black smoke rising from all around her, so thick it might be solid matter, a small planet erupting. She doesn’t know where to go now. She drops to the ground, her feet bleeding, her toes balled together, the whole foot arching inward in pain. She can hear the planes on their way out. She looks up, her eyes stinging, a sharp throb across her forehead. She can see fires all around her. She wonders if she’s been hit.

  She is suddenly terrified of being alone. She thinks about the field hospitals, how the dying are put behind that awful curtain, some of them begging not for a doctor but for the comfort of a friend, a nurse, a buddy, the face of someone to reassure them as they die. She feels the same way now, the frantic need for connection, the unwillingness to be left behind. The planes could come back and drop more napalm. The napalm terrifies her like nothing else. She’s seen cans of it, ribbed, innocent, silver cans that might hold apple sauce or peanuts, rather than jellied gasoline. She has heard the stories of how soldiers are cooked inside the flames, their skin falling from the bone as they dance in the fire that pours over them like water. Now, as she is surrounded by fires igniting the jungle as kindling, she begins to panic. She searches frantically from side to side and she sees, as though waiting specifically for her, a cluster of steel straws protruding from the ground, a set of ignites camouflaged so well into the earth that it is as though they are naturally part of the jungle, as much as the giant fronds, the elephant grass, the canopies of leaves. Her eyes fix on the mine and hold the rest of her completely still. She has to force herself to exhale, to look for a firing wire. Her vision begins to fracture and she uses every ounce of her concentration to bring herself back to the task at hand, to figure out how the mine has been set up, so that she can avoid it.

  She has seen such a mine before, just once, close up, when a young sergeant held one up in front of a group of new guys and said, “Gentlemen, meet Betty.” Then, it had been isolated, contained. Seeing the Bouncing Betty here, ready in the jungle, is like seeing a rare, lethal animal that you have seen before only in a zoo. She feels herself swimming in heat, in desperation. She begins to tremble, to push herself back, to spin her head wildly around looking for where the wire leads. She must stay clear-headed or she will die. She knows this, but she feels herself unraveling.

  The next explosion she thinks must be the Bouncing Betty. She covers her head with her hands, rolls into a ball; she feels time like a slow and expanding moment, like a dreadful weight. She is waiting. But a mine can explode only one time and these explosions continue, over and over, waves of sound coming from everywhere. She digs her chin into the earth, pushes her face as far down as she can, unable think at all. Even with her eyes closed she sees a wall of red, a dazzling constellation of colors against the backs of her eyelids, the drum of the explosions coursing through her. She has not been hit. She knows this and it mystifies her. She feels as though she has been propelled up into the air, away from the earth, preserved through some miracle of physics. Only later will she realize she hasn’t left this patch of earth, that the Bouncing Betty remains where it is, that the explosions are not here but a quarter-mile away. For now, she is sailing along the rolling explosions, feeling the vibrations against her teeth, the bones of her nose, the tender hollows of her temples. The noise is through her and around her. She clutches her knees, presses her chin into her collarbone, waits for it all to end, as she knows it must. But the planes recede; they always do. And as much as they try, they cannot obliterate the whole of the jungle or the people within.

  III

  There is a rotting smell in the taxi, like overripe fruit, its scent lodging itself high inside his nose. He cranks the window down. The smell takes him back to a taxi ride with Susan, looking at her beside him on the balding cloth seat, her hair wild across her face, her pale eyes blinking against it. He remembers how she tried to comb back the locks with her fingers, but the hair escaped, streaming like kite tails. They’d rolled the windows down then, too, because the smell was so strong and sick-making.

  That was not long ago, a couple of months, tho
ugh of course in the curious manner in which time stretches and condenses with its own, peculiar logic in Vietnam, it seems a long time. This same smell—what is it? Cabbage, rotten food, dirty clothes?—draws him right back. Susan had buried her head in his chest. She’d shorn her hair from its previous length so that it was harder to collect all at once, and he remembers, too, how he’d walked into the room late one night and seen her there in front of the mirror, her reflection in the glass, the scissors in her hands. She turned to him, the length of her lopped hair in pieces across her shoulders, the corners of her mouth turned up, the hair like confetti all around her. I’ve always wanted to do this, she said, as though talking about a place she’d always wished to go to. She stepped to greet him, her neck newly exposed like some part of her he had not seen before. He took the scissors from her hand, sifted his fingers through her hair, lifted her chin up to him, and kissed her.

  He feels her absence now like a sudden space once comfortably filled, a solid piece of himself now missing. He is no longer anchored by her, is drifting dangerously. To say he misses her is an insulting, ridiculous statement. He is frightened for her and there is no relief.

  The taxi in which they’d traveled, like the one he is in now, had been filthy It looked as if it had been buried, then excavated. That’s what he’d told her. Thing looks like it’s been exhumed, he said, and felt the satisfaction of her small laugh.

  Sometimes the cars in Vietnam were constructed out of several other wrecks. Susan had told him this, not then, but another time. Another of the many taxi rides they’d taken together. She’d likened the ingenious recycling of auto parts to the Vietcong practice of making mines out of dud howitzer shells, houses from flattened cans of Cola, and told him the only waste there was left in the country was what happened to the people. That was true, he’d agreed. That was true.